Whether you’re running a business or attempting to build up a successful blog, dedicated web hosting for your website is a huge part of ensuring you have an effective online presence. In its simplest form, web hosting allows you to construct a website and allow anyone in the world to access it.
One of the most important things for website owners is that their site is seen by as many people as possible, and that it works consistently and seamlessly. Unless your site is professionally hosted, it may well struggle to handle high traffic, which can cause slow-loading, downtime or server failure. If a potential customer or reader struggles to navigate quickly around your site, chances are that they won’t visit your site again. For an eCommerce site in particular, it reflects poorly on your reliability as a company if your website is slow and badly-designed, and visitors are less likely to engage or convert on a slow-loading or poorly performing site.
The best way to ensure that your site can handle high traffic is to purchase an appropriate amount of bandwidth from your hosting company. In layman’s terms, your bandwidth is the amount of data which can be transferred from your site to the end user, in the format of pages, text, and media such as images and video. Web hosting companies often offer a variety of bandwidth plans, determined by your requirements.
Another benefit of professional web hosting is that you can acquire enough web space to support additional content, such as pictures, videos and audio files. These can be a vital way of making your site stand out, or of communicating information to your readers. Again, if you don’t have enough bandwidth, adding this additional content can seriously slow down your site, so having expert web hosting professionals on-hand to offer advice and support is definitely worth the investment.
There are numerous forms of hosting available; the most popular include managed hosting and cloud hosting. With managed hosting, the web hosting company owns and is responsible for almost every aspect of the network on which your website operates, providing a stable, comprehensively managed environment for your site. Cloud hosting is a utility based hosting model which allows you to scale your hosting requirements as required. It’s an extremely cost effective solution as you don’t need to make any upfront capital investments in technology and you only pay for what you use. This means you still have access to best of breed technology, without the costs. Both of these hosting solutions have individual advantages which you should talk over with your hosting company before making a final decision.
When seeking professional web hosting, make sure to look for a reputable company with a background in the industry. Reliable web hosting services should be available twenty-four seven to keep your website functioning in case of technical problems, and should be able to offer a variety of bandwidth and hosting packages or bespoke solutions to best suit your individual needs. A good hosting provider will work with you to ensure you have a hosting package that best suits your business needs. Those which excel in customer service will keep you aware of updates in the hosting market and new or updated packages which may be suitable for your business. They will also continue to advise you as your business develops and expands and your hosting requirements change. With online trading becoming an increasingly vital part of any business, it’s an investment that’s always worth making.
Rackspace Hosting is the world's leading specialist in managed hosting. Rackspace provides Fanatical Support® to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including cloud hosting.